Brendan- I agree with the groundrules. Good post, and thanks for clearing some thing up.
Many “chip” like products are fried in cottonseed oil, and AFAIK, even Vegans can eat potato chips.
Cool, I’ll get to searching as soon as I can. (I know it Friday and I still have work—shoot me please!!)
Vegans go more the whole health thing so processed foods like chips are absolutely out. And as I enjoy my holy blessed easter chocolate I am somewhat certian that this would also be passed over. Man, thats funny.
Nothing like having a nice conversation with a person named DrDeth 
Let’s move one at a time.
1. Ag is a big polluter, whether you are growing traditional tillage, organic, no-till, or whatever. Each practice has its environmental benefits and costs.
I don’t see as there is much to debate here.
For conventional tillage, you’ve got a rotation of crops, between which you would break the soil surface with implements such as disks, plows, and tillers. It cuts back on your weeds, and thus anything you use to control the weeds, such as glyphosate. It also can incorporate any manure or other fertilizers into the soil, making it less likely to be washed off in a rain. It does expose loose soil to erosion by wind and rain, a big, big minus.
No till doesn’t expose that fragile (and valuable) soil to severe erosion. Instead, litter from the last crop is left on the soil surface and weeds are knocked back with a herbicide. The soil surface is not broken, and the previous crop’s root system holds the soil together. No till doesn’t eliminate erosion, but it sure reduces it drastically. Clearly, no-till will not work forever. Every few years you’ll need to plow & disk to uncompact the soil.
Organic farming eliminates the herbicides, but usually (not always) at the expense of frequent tilling to control nuisance weeds. So the soil surface is frequently (if not constantly) broken, which is worse than conventional tillage in terms of erosion.
So the question is, what’s worse for the environment, the pesticides or the soil loss from erosion?
Tough call. It may depend on the condition of the ground and surface waters nearby, erodability of the soil, cost of the inputs, value of the outputs. Like so many environmental problems, this one is not cut and dried as some would have us believe.
Want more?
Aside: Canadian sources should be fine.
Let’s not stomp all over ILOs (what we’d call CFOs, or confined feeding operations). They have a huge and often neglected environmental benefit: Manure is typically stored in watertight pits or tanks until the time is right for application: when there is no heavy rain in sight and the crops need the nutrients. That’s big bucks in those tanks: the equivalent of tens of thousands of dollars in commercial fertilizers.
Contrast that to a pastured animal. It deposits its nutrients and bacteria whenever it wants to, including in the middle of a downpour in the middle of winter. That deposit is washed away and wasted.
Best,
Dev
no-till is usually better for soil but it is not always possible. Potatoes for example cannot be produced under low till management. This is noted statistically in regions that produce potatoes and the likes.
As for organic production the farmers are very much aware of the requirements to maintain their status. “Organic” is treated like a brand and requires third party validation. Certified organic is based on best management on overall basis. It must be applied to local requirements.
Weed control is a mild issue for organic farmers but a variety of approaches are used for control and not only conventional tilling.
Crop Rotation
Cover Crops
Compost
Clean seeds
Planting date
Variety
Row Width and Plant Population
Harrowing or Rotary Hoeing
Inter-Row Cultivation
New Weeds
Sanitation
here is a good quality newsletter that briefly describes the management in non-tech terms.
These are common concerns that most people respond with. Lets see…
- I am glad that Ag is cleaning up. and yes the conversion to better sustainable practices is expensive at first. However in long term (maybe 5 years) the benifits weigh in. Low-intrest government loans and tax-incentives are one approach. That Ag is being forced to clean up could be a clue. When have you known a government to be 100% altruistic.
paying more for food?? the vegitation spends less on food than most meat consumers. (Yes Cert Organic does have a premium price.) but why would one suggest to import cheaper food from low-standard countries? Do you buy clothing made with child labour?
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not all of meat production is done on marginal lands. not even close AFAIK. Remember the shifting production to ILO’s or CFO’s. A sustainable practice would be to let the marginal lands grow wild. this will increase local and national biodiversity if enough land is returned to the wild. It provides forrage area for pests that would otherwise hit crops. Acts as a natural buffer for runoff and as a watershed.
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true
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What??? enough arable land??? What??? labour??? what are you talking about???
There might be a whole lotta mis-conceptions here. -
These are practices of conventional farming. There are better appraoches available right now.
Please note that monoculture crops are not promoted by vegitarians. They prefer variety in their diet.
That’s obvious enough. After all, harvesting potatoes requires breaking the soil surface. From what I’ve seen those cultivators do, it’s looks like it mixes that soil up real bad.
I’d say it is the second biggest problem after insect and disease control. Third if you count all the certified organic requirements.
That was a great reference! On to their examples:
Crop Rotation: This is done conventionally, too.
**Cover Crops: **Same.
**Compost: **Check. Sometimes done conventionally
**Clean seeds: **Check, but done conventionally, too.
Planting date: Check
**Variety: **Check
Row Width and Plant Population: A good thing, but not always suitable in mid to large scale operations.
Harrowing or Rotary Hoeing: This breaks the soil.
Inter-Row Cultivation: This breaks the soil.
New Weeds: “Walk through fields to manually control problem weeds.” 
You are just not goint to be able to do this on a 500 acre operation. That’s what I’m talking about when I say there aren’t enough people to go organic and still expect to feed billions.
Sanitation: Check
Most of the low-impact items on your list are already done conventionally. The ones that aren’t either aren’t practical on mid-size or bigger operations or aren’t no-till.
Don’t get me wrong: Small-size (<25 hectacre), high-value organic operations are great: I wish there were more. They are environmentally friendly, and, frankly, they grow the best vegetables. But we’d need an vast army of these guys to feed the world. More on that later.
Best,
Dev
Sometimes it is more like 25 or 30 years. I have a more radical solution: Government funding of BMPs and purchase in fee simple of riparian buffers (by condemnation if neccessary).
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Cite?
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We’re (US) are already importing lots of food from low standard countries. To think that without trade manipulation it will not increase is pretty naive.
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I’m actually seeing a shift away from CFO’s, particulary dairies, where ranging seems to be a more economic model for mid-size operations. You’ll gross less but net more.
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Sloped & rocky marginal lands are mostly uplands, so if you want a buffer, you’ll be doing it in the absolute wrong spot. Arid lands, like the rangelands in the American West and Canadian central region almost require the presence of hooved mammals for their natural environmental state. Might as well be cattle or Bison, huh? The areas are overgrazed now, but that too is changing for the better.
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Well, assuming environmentally friendly, we’ll either have expensive (high-labor) or low yield (high area) organic models. We don’t have enough people willing to do grunt fieldwork to feed the world with the first model, or enough good cropland for the second model.
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And they are being used. I’m just arguing that there are minuses involved with organic farming as well. Notably, increased erosion and commercial fertilizer usage. These seem a neccessary part of an organic model.
Best,
Dev
Oh, the irony. Same fellow who snarkily asks me whether I even read the posts before I respond can’t be bothered to read the question I ask. Lemme repeat it:
Bolding added.
Try again? And no, I won’t accept the cites of other posts in this thread: you gotta do real live actual research.
Daniel
cost of “meatatarianism” (my new word)
I went to my local supermarket “Loblaws” today, good quality, very popular.
cost of 1Kg of extra lean ground beef $7.69 or $0.77 per 100g serving (approx 3.5 ounces)
cost of store brand lowfat cottage cheese $3.99 or $0.40 per 100g
nutritional info for the meat from instore counter (per 100g)
cal 139
protein 19g
carbs 0g
fats 7g
nutritional info from label on cottage cheese (per 100g)
cal 85
protein 12g
carb 7g
fats 1g
I know dairy isn’t vegan but most vegitarians (inc myself) consume dairy.
pound for pound I saving money.
Dev Null, You asked about this in reference to better management.
Unfortunately better management is not as wide spread as I hope. There are a multitude of reasons many related to economic risk. Farming works on a rather narrow margin so to a producer any conversion that makes some of their equipment obsolete is rather painfull.
There are of course minuses for any agriculture. It is a draw upon the land but the best idea is to draw upon the “intrest” and not the “capital” or not depleting what cannot be replaced.
Organic certification has very strict rules and AFAIK arount here commercial (take to mean chemical source) fertilizers are grounds for revocation of certification.
you said there is a shift away from CFO’s for dairy? Do you know how much? Would you say its signifigant? hope so.
If we are assuming a vegan/vegetarian society, there would be no non-commercial fertilizers. The reason should be obvious.
There is a shift away from CFOs for dairy. One of the areas I work in has lots of Mennonite farmers. I guess some of the older Mennonites never went into concentrated feeding. Eventually, word got around that those guys were making more money than the newer CFOs. At this point, most of the new operations in that area that are coming on line are ranged. But considering the capital and inertia, reversion to ranged will take a long time. As I mentioned before, a ranged cow has its own environmental problems that a confined one does not. So, I can’t say for sure that one system is better than another, just that one seems cheaper.
Best,
Dev
If we are assuming a vegan/vegetarian society, there would be no non-commercial fertilizers. The reason should be obvious.
There is a shift away from CFOs for dairy. One of the areas I work in has lots of Mennonite farmers. I guess some of the older Mennonites never went into concentrated feeding. Eventually, word got around that those guys were making more money than the newer CFOs. At this point, most of the new operations in that area that are coming on line are ranged. But considering the capital and inertia, reversion to ranged will take a long time. As I mentioned before, a ranged cow has its own environmental problems that a confined one does not. So, I can’t say for sure that one system is better than another, just that one seems cheaper.
Best,
Dev
If we are assuming a vegan/vegetarian society, there would be no non-commercial fertilizers. The reason should be obvious.
There is a shift away from CFOs for dairy. One of the areas I work in has lots of Mennonite farmers. I guess some of the older Mennonites never went into concentrated feeding. Eventually, word got around that those guys were making more money than the newer CFOs. At this point, most of the new operations in that area that are coming on line are ranged. But considering the capital and inertia, reversion to ranged will take a long time. As I mentioned before, a ranged cow has its own environmental problems that a confined one does not. So, I can’t say for sure that one system is better than another, just that one seems cheaper.
Best,
Dev
A good point. A dairy resourse would be the easy answer.
Not all crops need fertilization. Legumes with nitrigen fixing bacteria in ther root structure do fine on their own. After harvest stock and leaves can help restore some NH3 by composting.
In an production area with reduced source of nitrogen, Direct soil ingection would aid in absorbsion and greatly reduce runoff. Crop rotation should also be factored. It remains an issue
P.S. I am still researching but most of the good data is subscription and the remaider list raw data without interpretation.
This is my first chance to poke around.
B
If we are assuming a vegan/vegetarian society, there would be no non-commercial fertilizers. The reason should be obvious.
There is a shift away from CFOs for dairy. One of the areas I work in has lots of Mennonite farmers. I guess some of the older Mennonites never went into concentrated feeding. Eventually, word got around that those guys were making more money than the newer CFOs. At this point, most of the new operations in that area that are coming on line are ranged. But considering the capital and inertia, reversion to ranged will take a long time. As I mentioned before, a ranged cow has its own environmental problems that a confined one does not. So, I can’t say for sure that one system is better than another, just that one seems cheaper.
Best,
Dev
Sorry for the multi-posts. Don’t know what’s up with that.
Would you care to take a small wager that the correlation between the number of cellular phones per capita and obesity (not to mention heart disease) is equally stunning? Should we infer from this that cellular phones cause obesity and heart disease?
Excuse my editing.
Now I realise that you were illustrating the relative costs of food bills here. However you are doing so in order to support your contention that the relative price of organic food is largely irrelevant. The trouble here is the organic cheese is still coming from grazing animals, and so the whole comparison seems rather pointless to me. I doubt that dairy animals are less environmentally damaging than meat animals. And given that they tend to be produced in higher rainfall and more fertile areas I not intensively, I suspect they would be more so.
Not quite true. There are two primary non-animal, non-“chemical” fertilizer sources:
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Compost. This isn’t just your kitchen compost pile: I’ve been to an organic apple orchard that composted all their waste from a 1,200 acre farm (I think that was the size – it was over 1,000 acres). They had a $20,000 compost-turning machine, and three football-field-length rows of compost, each taller than I am. They used this composted waste to add nutrients back to their land.
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Cover crops. One of the primary uses of fertilizer is to add nitrogen back into soil: most plants need nitrogen to form proteins but can only grab it from compounds in soil. Some plants, however, – clovers, ryes, legumes, etc. – can “fix” nitrogen from the air, enabling them to grow in a nitrogen-poor environment. If you sow a field in winter rye, for example, and then in Spring you plow the rye under, much of the nitrogen that the rye fixed will become available to the real crop you plant in that space.
It is true, however, that animal waste is a very good and readily available source of organic fertilizer. I should point out that a great deal of animal waste ends up as a pollutant: here in North Carolina, the problem is especially bad, the result of huge hog farms that moved to the state in the mid nineties.
Daniel
Composting is great–but you’ll never have enough to make up for losses. As an aside, a cow-orker is working on a computer-controlled composter. Pretty slick, and should cut composting times substantially.
Those cover crops still require addition of Phosphorus. Furthermore the bacteria required for fixation can’t survive everywhere. I’m not sure what the the “Certified Organic” program has to say about the inoculants these crops require, too.
My take on North Carolina’s Hog problem: It isn’t a inherent problem with raising hogs or with CFOs. It was more a political, management, and engineering failure with a bit of bad luck thrown in. I guess to sum up my thesis here: Agriculture, both animal and crop, doesn’t have to be very polluting at all. We, as a society, need to make the decision to allocate the resources to make it happen. The question is, are people ready to pay, say, $5 for a gallon of milk, dozen of eggs, or bag of potato chips?
Bottom line: I don’t see why some farmers think they should be exempt from pollution control while every other business discharger has to deal with it.
Since I did not make that claim, nor is that correct, there is no need for a cite. As I said bbefore- you CAN grow regular human quality crops on second rate land- it is just that the feed quality crops can be grown with less or no irrigation water, and less manpower. It is more economical to grow feed quality crops on second quality land. And, like you own quote says “Do you have any support for these TWO positions” (caps mine). I gave you support for the one- the other position I do not hold nor did not make.
I am still waiting for your cites, by-the-way. Note- I asked first.
OTOH, it is good to see two guys- who it appears each know more about AG that both of us combined - having an informed debate about this. Your claim “it seem pretty clear that eating meat has a far greater impact on the environment than eating an equivilant vegan diet” so far has not been backed up at all- and one thing is for sure- from seeing Dev & Brendan debate this- it is FAR from “clear”.